Government Fraud Is Not a Victimless Crime

In political debates about government assistance, fraud is too often treated as an abstraction — a budget line item, a policy problem, an election-year talking point.

It is much more than that. It is a moral failure with real victims. Kansans deserve an honest conversation about who those victims are.

Kansas’s public assistance programs are not small. Nearly 440,000 Kansans are enrolled in KanCare, at a cost of over $5 billion last year. Another 188,000 receive SNAP food benefits, costing Kansas households $400 million annually.

These programs are funded entirely by working people — farmers, tradesmen, nurses, teachers, small business owners, every Kansan who gets up in the morning and goes to work.

When fraud occurs at this scale, the theft is not from some faceless government entity.

It is from those working people. It is from the neighbor who paid their taxes honestly. It is from the elderly woman on a fixed income wondering why her property taxes keep rising. It is from the young family in Coffeyville or Derby or Liberal trying to get ahead and failing to understand why everything keeps costing more.

Fraud is not a victimless crime. Its victims are ordinary Kansans who never volunteered to be anyone’s patron — but are, whether they know it or not.

Consider the self-attestation policy that has governed much of Kansas’s Medicaid enrollment.

Under this system, an applicant simply states their income, household size, and residency — and that self-reported information is accepted without independent verification.

No documentation required. Just their word.

That policy sounds compassionate. In practice, it is something else: an open invitation to dishonesty that corrupts the entire system.

The most striking example is the self-attestation policy for pregnancy. No documentation required. No testing. You simply declare that you are pregnant. This applies regardless of medical history — even for women who have had surgical procedures that render pregnancy impossible, and even for women well past childbearing age.

A system that credulous is not generous. It is negligent. And its negligence is paid for by people who are neither negligent nor dishonest.

If you walked into a bank and asked for a loan, the bank would not accept your word about your income. It would ask for documentation. It would verify. Because money is at stake.

Hundreds of millions of Kansas taxpayer dollars are at stake here too. The moral logic is identical: when significant resources are involved, honesty must be confirmed, not merely assumed. A policy that does otherwise does not express compassion — it systematically rewards dishonesty at the expense of honesty.

The most compelling argument against benefit fraud is one rarely made with sufficient weight: fraud threatens the survival of the programs themselves — and it is the truly vulnerable who pay the heaviest price when those programs eventually fail.

Think carefully about who genuinely depends on Medicaid and SNAP. The child from a low-income family who would otherwise go hungry. The disabled adult who cannot work. The working mother whose income falls just short of covering both rent and groceries. These are the people these programs exist to protect.

When fraud inflates program costs, it harms every one of them. It drains resources from legitimate recipients. It drives costs to levels that provoke political backlash and budget cuts. It erodes the public trust that sustains any social program long-term. And ultimately, it puts the entire safety net at risk.

The people who suffer most when a program collapses are not the fraudsters, who will simply move on — it’s the people who have nowhere else to turn.

That makes the status quo not merely inefficient. It makes it immoral.

Kansas House Bill 2731, which becomes law July 1 following a legislative override of Governor Kelly’s veto, takes meaningful steps toward restoring the moral integrity of these programs.

It requires verification of income, household size, and residency before benefits are awarded — not as a trap, but as basic accountability.

It mandates regular cross-checks of enrollee data against death records, employment records, incarceration records, and lottery winnings — the kind of common-sense data matching any competent financial institution would conduct automatically.

And it aligns Kansas with expanded federal work requirements for able-bodied adults receiving food assistance.

Critics will call these measures harsh. They are not. A 30-day notice period before any action is taken on a discrepancy is not a trap — it is fairness. Asking people to document their eligibility before receiving benefits funded by their neighbors’ labor is not cruelty — it is the same standard applied in virtually every other significant financial transaction in American life.

Accountability is not the enemy of compassion. It is the precondition for sustainable compassion. A safety net anyone can access regardless of eligibility is not stronger than one with integrity — it is weaker, because it is unsustainable, and because it consumes resources meant for people who truly need them.

At its best, a public assistance program represents a genuine social contract: the community agrees to care for its most vulnerable, and recipients agree to be honest about their circumstances and pursue self-sufficiency when able. That contract, honored by both parties, is a genuine expression of community solidarity.

But a social contract runs in both directions. When recipients falsify their eligibility, they are not merely breaking a rule. They are betraying the community that extended them trust. They are taking from people who cannot afford to give. They are stealing from the genuinely vulnerable by consuming resources meant for someone else’s desperate need.

The working people of Kansas — those whose taxes fund these programs, who play by the rules, who tell the truth on their tax returns and their loan applications and their benefit eligibility forms — deserve a government that honors their honesty by demanding it equally of everyone.

The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either d or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.

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